


stay with me (go places)

by scatterscroll



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Domestic, Gen, Male Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 10:38:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2809340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scatterscroll/pseuds/scatterscroll
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lewis Nixon after the war lives like he’s got nothing left to lose. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to get away with living like he has nothing left to <em>give</em>. Not when he’s bringing back home someone who’s  maybe his first real friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	stay with me (go places)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Laliandra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laliandra/gifts).



> I'm pretty nervous about this. I tried to write some AUs but not one that was fun enough really took. Meanwhile, this post-war thing that drove me crazy from the start was the one fic that felt right out of the bunch. I still feel like maybe in places there may be too much of something-like-grief, but I still really hope you like it. 
> 
> Happy holidays! Writing for you and this fandom was great.
> 
> Disclaimer: This is based on the characters featured in the HBO miniseries _Band of Brothers_. This is a work of fiction and no disrespect is meant to the real-life individuals who inspired the portrayals herein.
> 
> Rated for instances of insensitive language.

Before Lew thought to offer Dick a place in his family’s company, he never mentions Nixon, New Jersey.

In his boarding school years being asked, “Hey Nixon, where are you from again?” got real old real fast. The first time he gets the question and lets everyone know that he’s Lewis Nixon III from Nixon, he’s too young to realize what would come from it.

In Yale, in the Army, and everywhere else after, when someone asks Lew where home is he doesn’t answer, not really.

“Anywhere’s home, everyone’s home,” he says once or twice when he’s too drunk to shift the conversation literally elsewhere. To the ladies, he repays the question. (“ _But no, really, where are you from, handsome?” “Where are_ you _from? Gonna show me?_ ”)

“Around,” is the closest he gets to an honest answer. He has been around. He likes it around, better than he does at home.

He enjoys having Dick around too, more than he wants to go home. But that’s where everyone who got through the war goes.

And like time flowing backwards, they leave the same way they came. First through England, then in a blur they’re back at the same docks in New York City. If going through the war is coming undone, for everyone around him it’s like the journey back is being remade. And here is the first layer of home they get to have back – American air filling their lungs and the sight of an Atlantic Ocean that’s friendlier on this side.

There are no parades because they’re not the first to make it back. It’s better this way, seeing the city as Nix knew it before he really knew anything.

With their few belongings sent ahead – entire Army careers packed away into a single chest each – hopping a train is as easy as he remembers it. He could be young again, coming back from a weekend he’ll only have half-stories about. 

There’s no lady hanging off his arm this time, just a man half-asleep at his shoulder with some stories they could tell between them would be better off half-forgotten.

Nixon doesn’t really feel like home. Lew is more fond of the leaving part than the coming back which probably disqualifies it from the title. The lack of situational awareness isn’t like Dick, but in a hired car, at the end of a long journey with long silences, Lew’s grateful that Dick isn’t awake to mention the sign for the township.

 

 

 

Stanhope Nixon married in 1917 and his son was born not too much later. He never got to go to war. He told Lewis this often, even before Pearl Harbor, because anyone paying attention knew that war was coming.

Military service isn’t just part of the Nixon history, it’s in the Nixon blood. Though Lew is too weak a swimmer to have joined the Navy like his grandfather, he is smart. Smart enough that he enlists early to figure out how he can be a part of the war on his own terms – not conscripted, not taken away from anything but his studies in Yale which he can finish later.

Joining the army, finishing OCS, and making it through the war are about the only things he’s done to make his father proud. Everything else he fights or has fought his father on. It was Yale instead of Princeton, it was marrying Katherine instead of waiting, and now it’s absolutely no ceremony to mark his return home.

It’s not just embarrassing, but unnecessary. All the celebration must’ve been wrung out of everyone here, they’ve all lost someone or known someone who lost someone. Seeing him come home to fanfare will do nothing for morale or for productivity, which he knows from his mother’s letters and from mailed reports his father sent were both on a steady decline.

Lew has never wanted to be anything like his father, but the Nixon Nitration Works stretches across acres and is the cornerstone of an economy here. It’s the family business and it’s his to run now.

It’s all Nixon, New Jersey has to offer him – his father and this factory – but he has a friend at least.

 

 

 

Dick doesn’t really need to interview for his position. There’s an opening that’s perfect for him with a paygrade that’s more or less what he was promised.

“I want to be professional, Nix,” he says.

He wears a suit and tie and sits down with Lew, his father, and some members of the board interested in meeting the wartime friend of the new man in charge.

There aren’t really any hard-hitting questions and Dick doesn’t have any revelations in store for Lew that day.

There some detail he goes into about his work history before the Army that amuse some of the older gentlemen. “Edison Electric, huh? You know Menlo Park’s not that far afield, son.”

The meeting wraps up quickly with exactly the approval Lew was already willing to give before the whole confab, but Dick seems more comfortable just touching base with people – letting them get to know him.

“So, Menlo Park?” Dick asks, casually. Not really interested, which is good because Lew can tell him next to nothing about it.

“I can show you where it is,” Lew says, shaking his head, “And I where the Menlo Park in California is, too. But can’t really tell you about Edison. You probably know more than me.”

Dick does, with more of a business focus than a science focus which works for chitchat at work.

 

 

 

For the first few weeks, Lews sleeps in the bedroom that was his as a child. Living with his father is unbearable, but he persuades Dick to stay on as a guest in a room down the hall.

It’s a better alternative to the house he still owns down the road. He was meant to live there with his wife and family, but the oppressiveness of his father looking over his shoulder and Kathy’s own loneliness made them leave even before there was a baby to worry about.

Both houses are too large, for any amount people. This one, at least, is furnished and clean.

 

The arrangement doesn’t suit Dick for long. He’s too polite to overstay any welcome and begins searching for accommodations just as Lew starts getting comfortable.

Because there’s nothing left to do about it, Lew opens the house he’d abandoned years before and invites Dick to live with him it’s be so empty in the vast space he suddenly has to himself.

Dick doesn’t seem too sure about whether to count the offer as more hospitality at first.

Still, he moves in the day Lew does, with a shipment of mostly new furniture and an old piano, the only thing taken from the older Nixon’s household.

“My sister’s. She hates my father more than I do,” is Lew’s explanation.

“Are you sure?” he keeps asking.

“Only idiots are ever sure of anything, Dick. Of course I’m sure,” he answers every time. Idiot feeling or not, he’s pretty certain that only Dick’s the only thing tipping the scales towards bearable for him in New Jersey.

A part of him yearns to leave, like he’s done so much before. He didn’t notice the wanderlust during the war because there was always another operation on the horizon and every objective was a harder task than the briefings ever prepared them for.

Heading the company means he has meetings elsewhere in the state occasionally and sometimes, in their dealings with the government, some longer trips. It’s not enough, so he uses the opportunities to sample the best whiskey his hosts can conjure up for him.

Some trips end up dry because Dick isn’t the only teetotal Lew meets, but at least he has his trusty Vat 69 in supply.

 

 

 

Both Lew and Dick are the kind of men who just can’t be alone for too long. They’re magnetic in different ways.

For Dick, it seems like he just knows how to draw a crowd in.

Lew, well, Lew always knows where there’s a party and he’s the one who can find the right people for a good time.

A small town like Nixon is more the natural habitat of Dick than Lew.

Outside his work in the company, he’s popular in their neighborhood.

While reading through contracts and memorandums, Lew is regaled by anecdotes of the progress of the garden next-door. He also learns of Dick’s alarmingly extensive knowledge of sod.

Lew grew up here, but Dick knows everyone’s name, even if they don’t work for the company.

Already they’re looking up to Dick like they did in Easy. (There are conversations along the lines of, _“There’s only so many hours in a day, but it always seems like he has twice what any other man does.” “Yes, he has time for everyone! How does he do it?_ ”)

Unsurprisingly, there are more female admirers of Dick’s charm on this side of the Atlantic. Surprisingly, this doesn’t lead to many dates. Or any at all. Dick goes out, he works, he gardens, and socializes somehow without going out for drinks. And he still has time to stay home with Lew, who’s never been the type to stay at home unless he was home here in Nixon. It’s not even as bad a time as it sounds in his head.

 

 

 

The week before Lew turns 28, he’s raising a series of toasts to his grandfather – the only Nixon who really mattered to this town – when he’s interrupted by a telephone call. Peculiar because only his father ever calls. Stanhope has the habit now of calling up their personnel manager in the off-hours just to check on things. Lew suspects _he_ is, in fact, things. More peculiar is is that he never calls when Nix is the only person at home to answer.

“Hello?” he says hesitantly. When he drops the phone, he blames his less-than-sober state. But really, it’s just Katherine. It’s the first time since they’ve spoken since signing their divorce paperwork.

“Kathy?” he asks just to be sure he’s hearing right. It is her and apparently the kid has just about forgotten his face, doesn’t have a frame of reference for the word father, and perhaps he might like to see her for is birthday.

“The kid?” he asks, even though it’s not really a question. His kid, their kid, _the kid_. He’d last seen her in New York, in the house Kathy had taken along with everything else. She hadn’t been hiding behind her mother’s skirts, but their hands were clasped and she wouldn’t look him in the eye. That was more than a year ago.

“Alright, fine, and the dog too,” Kathy says, annoyed. That gets Lew to laugh because Dick has wondered aloud lately if the house wouldn’t seem as large with a dog in it.

“Yeah,” he says slowly, softly, “I’d love to see the kid. And Caleb.”

 

 

 

Kathy called Caleb the dog, but he was still Lew’s dog, even after all this time, and he expects completely to be more excited to see the old animal.

The kid’s wrapped around the dog though and when he leans dog to hug them both, the kid flashes a smile he recognizes from the mirror.

They’re in Central Park, both him and Dick free from responsibilities for a weekend.

“You won’t tell her upsetting war stories, will you?” Debra, Katherine’s older ‘spinster’ sister, asks. She’s ostensibly looking at the both of them, but it’s the kind of comment Dick doesn’t deserve.

“Me? Do something to upset her mother? Never,” Lew deflects, before making the introduction.

“Debra, this is Dick. Richard Winters. He was a Major in the 101st Airborne Division. We served together.”

Debra’s as much the liberated woman her sister is, so she introduces herself, hand held out, “Debra Page, his sister-in-law, formerly as least.”

They catch up briefly. It’s a bit awkward following the divorce and Katherine not ever being her today, but Lew has only written and telephoned his mother since his parents’ divorce and he understands avoiding meetings. He honestly had to use the whole trip just to brace himself for the possibility of one. His dog wraps around him a few times, but goes when Debra tugs on his leash enough.

 

 

 

Now that there’s no one but him, the kid, and Dick, he has a plan to enact. Coney Island isn’t that much of a trip and it’s one he last made with Katherine before the kid was born. There’s probably a lot that’s new, but still a lot of the fun old stuff.

When he proposes it, Dick has a tiny smile he can’t suppress. Anytime they were here with the Army, it was a stop before heading somewhere else. There was never any time to explore.

“Isn’t she too young for a place like that?” Dick asks cautiously. Lew’s daughter’s already fond of her, another victim of his charm.

“None of those freak shows for her, if you want. Just um, food, y’know,” which doesn’t sound like a compelling reason for the trip, he thinks. “Ferris wheel!” he almost shouts when he remembers the Wonder Wheel, probably looking like a majorette while miming the movement of a Ferris wheel.

“Ever been on a roller coaster?” Or hey, I hear they’ve got this Parachute Jump ride.” He has more than heard about it. He’d taken the plunge before he even got to OCS. It’s nothing like the real thing, but there’s still a rush to it who wouldn’t mind feeling a second time.

Dick finally cracks a smile at that and relents.

It’s not as much fun as it could be because a nearly four-year-old can take the Wonder Wheel and look at the city from the heights no problem, but they won’t let her on the Parachute Jump and she’s too scared for the Thunderbolt, for all of the roller coasters.

It means that Lew and Dick take turns with the kid and ride by themselves. It’s fascinating in its own way. Lew watches Dick going around as an awed as a kid is almost as much as a gift as seeing his dog’s still alive and got all his teeth.

 

 

 

They bring the kid back a whole hour and a half later and bedtime’s probably a loss but they’ve made sure she’s had her dinner at least.

They could go back to see the fantastical things they’d even avoided approaching with the kid in tow, but instead they haul ass to not miss the train and Lew nurses swig after swig of his favorite whiskey.

He thinks about Nixon and wanting to get away. Thinks about a promise to go to Chicago. It’d take a week to really see everything there, make a trip worthwhile and half a weekend’s already behind them.

Getting Dick to agree is just a matter of making him forget his father for a while, Chairman of the Board and a bully as always. “I’ll tell him it was my idea,” Lew slurs.

“It is your idea,” Dick says gently. His smile from the afternoon is fading but still there.

“You know, he was born in Pennsylvania. My father, that is. I’ve never been. You don’t want me take you places, you should show me places. We can save my stories of the World’s Fair. We’ll need a week, okay? A week, whenever you agree. Whenever you want.”

Dick laughs like the laugh from England that evening before D-Day.

“This weekend, where would you want to go? Just tell me,” Lew asks again because his wanderlust feels solid in him like it hasn’t in a while.

“Just home, Lew,” Dick says.

“Nixon, huh? Home. Ok,” Lew says. And he heads back to Nixon, half-asleep against Dick’s shoulder, stories of the day already half-forgotten.


End file.
